Want to Present at CHIME19? Here are Tips for Getting Selected
2.19.2019
Candace Stuart – Director, Communications & Public Relations
Being selected to be a speaker at a CHIME track session or at Leadership from the Edge is no easy task. The competition is high, and for Foundation firm members there is the added requirement of partnering with a CIO or senior healthcare IT executive who is a member of CHIME. Last year, two Foundation members embraced the challenge and were invited to participate alongside their CIO colleagues.
What was the secret to their success? Great topics, great relationships and great timing.
“Be very careful about topic selection,” advised Jocelyn Clarke, executive director at Kirby Partners. Clarke co-presented a Leadership from the Edge session on women in the health IT workplace with Myra Davis, senior vice president and CIO at Texas Children’s Hospital. “Try to pick something that really hits on the zeitgeist of what is going on in healthcare IT so that it gets the audience excited. The odds of getting a CIO to collaborate with you will be much higher if the topic is very valuable and exciting at the same time.”
The topic should be interesting, innovative and address a need, added Kali Durgampudi, chief technology and innovation officer at Greenway Health. Durgampudi, then in the role of vice president of innovation and mobile architecture at Nuance Healthcare, paired with Shafiq Rab, MD, senior vice president and CIO at Rush Medical Center, for a track session titled “The Journey from Virtual Assistants to Ambient Clinical Intelligence.” They avoided discussing products and instead focused on strategies for using ambient clinical intelligence to assist physicians in their workflow.
“We took great care so that it was not a sales pitch about a product but actually a sales pitch about a concept,” Durgampudi said. “And that concept resonates easily with both technology and clinical people. “
Having a good fit with your CIO counterpart is key, Clarke and Durgampudi said. Clarke and Davis’ Leadership from the Edge proposal was based on a survey of Davis and 16 other women CIOs to assess the state of the industry for women. The findings originally were used in a career-focused HIMSS presentation for women directors and managers who aspired to be C-suite executives. Davis’ career path and successes aligned well with the overall results, which – contrary to some industries – showed women CIOs were thriving.
“Given the cultural climate of the last couple of years,” Clarke said, “I thought this would surprise people in a positive way, make people feel energized about the kind of culture healthcare is building for men and women at the executive level.”
Durgampudi and Rab share a passion for innovation. They wanted to showcase advanced technologies like artificial intelligence and deep learning to help others understand how these tools can be used in clinical settings.
“We believe this is a tremendous game changer and a value-add,” Durgampudi said. “We wanted others to think through, figure out and learn.” Based on the enthusiastic question-and-answer session that followed, their talk inspired many in the audience to continue to explore the possibilities of the technologies.
CHIME is accepting proposals to participate in track sessions or Leadership from the Edge at the 2019 CHIME Fall CIO Forum in Phoenix in early November. To be eligible, a CHIME Foundation member must partner with a CHIME member on the proposal. To learn more about the proposal process and to submit a proposal for a track session or Leadership from the Edge, go here.